(EMAILWIRE.COM, August 08, 2018 ) In fairness, all currencies are a confidence trick. The US dollar, British pound, and the Euro all depend on nothing more than market confidence for their value. The extent to which a currency works effectively is a function of a range of factors and this report...

According to Moody's, investors have pulled cash from actively managed equity mutual funds in the US at the fastest year-to-date pace on record. The funds lost $129.11 billion of investor dollars from January to July, up from $99.88 billion a year earlier, data compiled by the Investment Company Institute and cited by Moody's show.

The flight of money away from managers who meticulously pick stocks and to exchange-traded funds is happening a bit faster than Moody's had forecast. The market share of passive investments last year was nearly 35%, more than the credit-rating agency's estimate of 34%.

Elon Musk reportedly met with Japan's SoftBank last year about taking Tesla private

The report came the day after Musk said he was considering taking Tesla private and that funding had been secured, but did not offer any specifics about the unprecedented move.

Bloomberg reported that Musk and Son failed to reach an agreement over the structure of the company, citing sources. Tesla was trading around $300 per share in April 2017 when the talks reportedly fell through. The talks are no longer underway, Bloomberg said.

One in 2 ICOs failed in the 2nd quarter — and those that succeeded suffered huge losses

Money continues to flood into the booming market for digital tokens issued by startups despite declines both in the quality of the projects seeking funding and in the investment returns, according to a new report.

Fifty-five percent of so-called initial coin offerings failed to complete in the second quarter, according to a report from the agency ICORating. That was 5% more than failed in the first quarter.

ICOs are a fundraising method in which companies and projects issue digital tokens structured like bitcoin or Ethereum. These tokens are sold in return for cash used to fund the development of the seller's businesses. ICOs exploded from almost nothing to be a multibillion-dollar market in 2017, surging in popularity alongside the rise in the price of bitcoin.

(EMAILWIRE.COM, August 08, 2018 ) In fairness, all currencies are a confidence trick. The US dollar, British pound, and the Euro all depend on nothing more than market confidence for their value. The extent to which a currency works effectively … Continue reading →

Independent DJ Justin Blau (known on stage as 3LAU) didn’t exactly stumble into the cryptocurrency industry — to say so would misrepresent how much thought he’s put into his blockchain-based event network, Our Music Festival (OMF). But at the very least, his introduction to the space came through a touch of serendipity.

Blau became formally acquainted with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies after a chance meeting with the Winklevoss twins at a music festival in 2014. The Winklevosses were making their own debut into the industry, as they were in the early stages of building their Gemini exchange at the time.

After hitting it off with the up-and-coming DJ, they invited Blau back to their penthouse, a welcome alternative to crashing at an exorbitant downtown hotel, Blau admitted in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine. That night — and the blockchain-centric conversation that dominated it — had Blau hooked on the young and novel tech.

“I very quickly saw all the ways in which blockchain [technology] could disrupt the music business and all aspects of the music business — from digital music to live music to manager and artist relationships — disintermediating the entire business as a whole. And I just found myself thinking about it all the time.”

Business moguls and financial thoroughbreds as the Winklevosses are, the encounter may have felt a little like looking into a rearview mirror for Blau. Before dropping out of Washington University in St. Louis to pursue a music career — a decision encouraged by one of his finance professors — he was in line for an internship fast track to Wall Street. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps for a career in finance, he set out to ride the momentum of his early days playing frat parties and college shows across the nation, a move that earned him the title “The DJ that turned down Wall Street” from Forbes.

So in connecting with the Winklevosses, the doors of the financial industry were opened to him again — only this time, the door was to a niche and highly stigmatized five-year-old field. Still, this same door opened up the possibility to reimagine his current occupation under a new economic model.

“After I performed my first ether transfer — I paid a Dutch company at 1:00 a.m. on a Saturday night in ETH for some animation work — I was like, ‘Holy crap, this is insane! Instant transfer of value. And that’s when I really started to dive in and learn as much as I possibly could and ask myself, ‘How could I be a part of it?’”

The answer became clear in August of 2017. After consuming crypto-related literature with voracious curiosity and attending blockchain conferences, Blau began mixing with some of the space’s leading innovators and professionals with help from the Winklevosses and some of his old college friends who had made their careers in tech.

“I just had all of these people who were very powerful, making introductions for me, and that’s when I started diving in deeper,” he said.

And Blau has found his place in the industry: on stage, both as host and performer, at the world’s first blockchain-powered music festival. Coming to fruition on October 20, 2018, Our Music Festival’s first iteration will be held at the Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley, with German-Russian DJ Zedd headlining, and Big Sean, Matt and Kim, and Charlotte Lawrence on the lineup, as well.

At its inception, OMF began as an effort to tokenize live music events. In essence, Blau explained, it’s goal was to decentralize the entire process, giving fans a degree of control over lineup curation and even a share of the festival’s revenue.

But as the space evolved and tokens entered the regulatory conversation, things became complicated.

“I think it’s important for any blockchain startup to be honest about the scope of the project,” Blau said in the interview. “It became really difficult to keep [to our original model], given the regulatory environment. We shifted to this utility token model, where the token represents demand for the festival as a product. And then we shifted again and asked, ‘So how do we do both?’ And that’s where we are now.”

For its inaugural year, the festival will be blockchain-related inasmuch as fans will be able to pay for tickets in crypto as well as fiat. They’ll also issue paper Ethereum wallets to all fans once they check in to the festival, a gesture in line with the educational insight Blau hopes the festival’s blockchain/crypto information booths will offer to its attendees.

Come next year, Blau hopes to integrate blockchain tech even further into the festival’s features. He wants to enable payments in OMF tokens, as well as to launch a reward system that allows fans to earn OMF by inviting friends to the festival, buying tickets early and committing data and feedback to the OMF ecosystem.

These tokens will also be used for discounts and promotions within the festival grounds, and Blau even intends to leverage them to give fans access to their favorite artists, backstage passes and VIP experiences.

In the far future, Blau wants Our Music Festival to tap into blockchain technology’s decentralized, peer-powered ethos to give fans a say in the festival’s lineup and a share of its revenue.

But to get there, Blau and his startup must reason and reckon with the industry’s technological and regulatory growing pains.

“We have to adapt as we go and that’s the biggest challenge for any company in an evolving space. Network scalability and regulatory environment are our biggest challenges,” he stated.

From a legal standpoint, Our Music Festival cannot offer revenue sharing, lest the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sees these payouts as dividends and its OMF token deemed a security. On the scalability front, Blau believes that the Ethereum network needs to mature before the festival can fully decentralize and implement more blockchain-driven functions.

If the network fails for whatever reason and someone can’t get into the festival, it’s a huge loss for the technology as a whole.

“In year one, we’re only going to start rolling out features if we know we can execute them. Because our biggest risk is the fan experience. If the network fails for whatever reason and someone can’t get into the festival, it’s a huge loss for the technology as a whole,” Blau reasoned.

“Year one is really kinda a launch event. Year two, start building out some of the tech. Year three to year five, our primary goals are giving fans ownership and enabling fans to vote for the lineups for these events. And in the long-term, even let them create their own small events.”

Until the long-term becomes the immediate present, the festival will “gradually decentralize over time,” Blau said, espousing “a firm belief in minimum viable centralization … to bring [his] concept to the mainstream.”

Helping him in his efforts, OMF features a stacked team of both music and tech industry professionals. COO Adam Lynn serves as co-founder and president of Prime Social Group, a concert and event company responsible for 900 events, 19 festivals and 400,000 ticket sales annually. Kevin Edelson, the company’s CMO, has a history of PR work for Universal Music Group and Red Light Management, among others.

For smart contract and blockchain development, Our Music Festival leverages the work and talents of Zach LeBeau, Shreesh Tiwari and G. Thomas Esmay, the core team at SingularDTV, a blockchain studio that focuses on digital media and entertainment.

Blau hopes that in bringing tech and creative professionals together, OMF will catalyze blockchain integration into the music industry. As for Blau, he’s hoping he can serve as a guiding intermediary between both industries.

There’s a little bit of a disconnect between existing industries and blockchain startups and my goal is to be that bridge. To show the tech people and engineers what people like me need, to bring the music business a little more across the fence into the space. So that’s my personal goal — to be the bridge.

The Blockchain and cryptocurrency are important tools for a decentralized market that needs to protect its speed, security, and reputation. Blockchain technologies are being researched by the largest corporations to securely transact and run their business. The concept of smart contracts, micro finance, and transparent transactions are all benefits of the Blockchain. This course will [...]

Ethereum Dark (CURRENCY:ETHD) traded 10.7% lower against the dollar during the 1-day period ending at 20:00 PM Eastern on August 8th. Ethereum Dark has a market capitalization of $69,732.00 and approximately $310.00 worth of Ethereum Dark was traded on exchanges in the last day. One Ethereum Dark coin can now be bought for $0.0465 or […]

If you could open up a savings account where you lost 10% upon opening it but earned 1% a day, would you do it? That's the tantalizing proposition behind P3D, a disruptive new economic experiment cloaked in the sheep's clothing of a controversial lottery type of game on the Ethereum blockchain.

Opera, a web browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux operating systems, will launch its desktop web browser with a built-in cryptographic wallet with Ethereum support. The company released a new version of the Opera...

Hi Mike,
The Bitfi is absolutely terrible. Search for the video where a loop of John McAfee plays endlessly over the device's display... It was completely pwned in the first week after its release and instead of awarding the pen-testers the bounty, the Bitfi team made threats against them.
The testers got root access to the device and identified a way to intercept the PIN code when it's entered on the device. Of course physical access is required, but this can happen during shipping or the so-called evil maid attack. The device also apparently phones home to somewhere in China, I'm not sure if it's tracking users.
Check out the series where the pentesters take this thing apart:
https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/hacking-the-bitfi-part-1/
So yeah, whatever you do, don't buy this thing. It's really poor technically and endorsed by a clown who'll say anything for money (McAfee once posted his rates to endorse any cryptocurrency).

公共ブロックチェーンでの基本的挑戦（51)NEW!2018-08-09 07:36:23テーマ：ブログ· Logging tools. Same as above.ロギングツール。 同上。· Security auditing. This is a big one. There’s just one notable security auditing service for Ethereum that I’ve heard of, Open Zepplin. Whi..

We want a functionality in our contract to change total supply automatic by owner,We need such api from infura so that when owner want to change total supply he can do. (Budget: $10 - $30 USD, Jobs: Ethereum)

Bitcoin and Ethereum Deep Dive and All of the Alt-coins Took a Deep Dive $BTCUSD, $ETHUSD Bitcoin prices collapsed Wednesday after the SEC delayed its decision on the proposed Bitcoin-related ETFs submitted by VanEck and SolidX. Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies deep dived Wednesday, with many digital currencies losing more than 10% of their value. Bitcoin […]

Microsoft’s New Ethereum Blockchain Product Gets Rid of MiningSoftware giant Microsoft has debuted a new Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) product that allows businesses across industry verticals to deploy a flexible instance of Ethereum tailored specifically for enterprise environments.Announced on Tuesday, Ethereum Proof-of-Authority on Azure allows enterprises to build applications on an Ethereum blockchain that is not secured by a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm and consequently does not require mining — features that are better suited for networks in which participants do not trust one another.PoW “works great in anonymous, open networks where cryptocurrency promotes security on the network,” said Azure Global software engineer Cody Born. “However, in private/consortium networks the underlying ether has no value.”Born explained that, since all participants on an enterprise blockchain network are known and reputable, governance can be separated from network operation. ... " Background:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum

Ethereum price has reached the important $350 price level and major support of previous April lows as expected by our last analysis. The trend remains bearish. However, there are many chances of at least a bounce towards $400 as 5 waves down could be completed from the July 18th highs.

Blue line - bullish divergence

Magenta line - triangle wave 4

The Ethereum price has many chances of a bounce towards $400 from current levels. I would not trade the bullish side but I would take any profits from a short position. Price has most probably completed 5 waves down. The fifth wave also has an RSI bullish divergence. This supports our view for a bounce.

We’ve had great traction with our support of Ethereum on Azure. The existing Proof-of-Work solution has been deployed tens of thousands of times across a variety of industry verticals. Through the extensive development on our platform, we’ve received great feedback from the community that has helped us shape our next Ethereum ledger product. I’m excited to announce the release of Ethereum Proof-of-Authority on Azure .

Proof-of-Authority

Proof-of-Work is a Sybil-resistance mechanism that leverages computation costs to self-regulate the network and allow fair participation. This works great in anonymous, open networks where competition for cryptocurrency promotes security on the network. However, in private/consortium networks the underlying ether has no value. An alternative protocol, Proof-of-Authority, is more suitable for permissioned networks where all consensus participants are known and reputable. Without the need for mining, Proof-of-Authority is more efficient while still retaining Byzantine fault tolerance.

Enterprise-ready

We’ve built this solution with the same principles that we drive in all our production services at Microsoft. In Proof-of-Authority, each consensus node on the network has its own Ethereum identity. In the case that a node goes down, it’s important that the member doesn’t lose consensus participation. Ideally, each member would run redundant consensus nodes to ensure a highly available network presence. To accomplish this, we’ve built an abstraction which allows each consensus participant to delegate multiple nodes to run on their behalf. Each Azure Proof-of-Authority network comes with our identity leasing system that ensures that no two nodes carry the same identity. In the case of a VM or regional outage, new nodes can quickly spin up and resume the previous nodes’ identities.

Web Assembly Smart Contracts

Enterprise developers often cite Solidity language as one of the largest pain points when developing on Ethereum. To address this, we’ve enabled Parity’s web-assembly support, allowing developers to author smart contracts in familiar languages such as C, C++, and Rust.

Azure Monitor

This solution also comes with Azure Monitor to track node and network statistics. For application developers, this provides visibility into the underlying blockchain to track block generation statistics. Network operators can use Azure Monitor to quickly detect and prevent network outages through infrastructure statistics and queryable logs.

Extensible governance

Many of our customers want to participate in a consortium, but don’t want to manage the network infrastructure. We’ve leveraged Parity’s highly extensible Proof-of-Authority client to build a level of abstraction that allows our users to separate consortium governance from network operation. Each consortium member has the power to govern the network and can optionally delegate the consensus participation to the operator of their choosing. The Proof-of-Authority deployment comes with a Governance DApp to simplify voting and validator delegation. With this solution, each consortium member has custody over his or her own keys, allowing secure signing to be performed in the wallet of preference, for example, MetaMask in-browser wallet, Ledger hardware wallet, or Azure Key Vault with ECC signing.

Governance DApp features
Decentralized governance - Changes in network authorities are administered through on-chain voting by select administrators.
Validator delegation - Authorities can manage their validator nodes that are setup in each PoA deployment.
Auditable change history - Each change is recorded on the blockchain, providing transparency and auditability.

Figure 1: Governance DApp allows for on-chain consortium management.

We’re excited to see the new applications that our customers build with Ethereum Proof-of-Authority in Azure . Check out ourdeployment guide to get started and learn more about the architecture and consortium governance.

Coconut is a novel selective disclosure credential scheme supporting
distributed threshold issuance, public and private attributes,
re-randomization, and multiple unlinkable selective attribute revelations.
Coconut integrates with blockchains to ensure confidentiality, authenticity and
availability even when a subset of credential issuing authorities are malicious
or offline. We implement and evaluate a generic Coconut smart contract library
for Chainspace and Ethereum; and present three applications related to
anonymous payments, electronic petitions, and distribution of proxies for
censorship resistance. Coconut uses short and computationally efficient
credentials, and our evaluation shows that most Coconut cryptographic
primitives take just a few milliseconds on average, with verification taking
the longest time (10 milliseconds).

Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 08/08/2018 -- Akin to credit cards, the concept of cryptocurrency was not easily digested by its targeted audiences but in the past couple of years, its usage and value has multiplied exponentially. With an assurance of tracking down all monetary transactions at its backbone, cryptocurrencies with Blockchain Technology such as Bitcoin and Ether are primed to revolutionize a number of industries.

The prosperity of the cryptocurrency market has been reassured by a recent business intelligence publication by Transparency Market Research (TMR), which has projected the global demand to increment at an exceptional compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31.3% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025. In terms of revenue, the TMR report has estimated the opportunities in the global cryptocurrency market to attain a value of US$6.7 billion by 2025. Here are some of the key drivers or benefits of cryptocurrency that are primed to stroke the demand for the same:

Protection against frauds: The primary benefit with cryptocurrency is that it functions as a digital platform that is immune to counterfeiting or reversal arbitrarily by the sender or receiver. This attribute is turning cryptocurrency a major boost to the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector, although a number of other sectors can also leverage it.

Property settlements made easy: Invariably, purchasing or selling real estate properties requires the involvement of quite a few third parties such as notary, lawyers, and brokers, for which tracking down of the fee payments is paramount as well as tiresome job. Cryptocurrency has the potential to eliminate the requirement of approval from third parties.

Reduced costs: As of now, the cryptocurrency miners are paid by the network, which means there are no transaction fees, as changed exuberantly by the banking sector. Acting similar to how Paypal serves its credit card and cash users, a log of each transaction is available anytime for trackback.

Accessible to everyone: More than two billion people across the world are now connected via the Internet, and the number is surging consistently on the back of growing ubiquity of smartphones. Individuals are now opting for mobile payment options for the ease they offer against carrying cash or card. Cryptocurrency is the technology that is expected to be adopted strongly by the mobile payment service providers in the near future.

Universal recognition: Cryptocurrency promises to overcome the bonds of exchange rates, transaction charges, interest rates, and other charges when money is wired across countries. This not only curtails the overall cost, it can also aid in saving lots of time in between.

According to the TMR report, Bitcoin is the leading component of the cryptocurrency market that is currently dominating, although some of the others such as Litecoin, Ripple, Ethereum, and Namecoin are also gaining popularity slowly but surely. Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., BTL Group Ltd., Xilinx Inc., BitGo, Alphapoint Corporation, NVIDIA Corporation, and BitFury Group Limited are some of the notable companies currently holding a prominent position in this market. Geographically, North America is expected to retain its dominance throughout the aforementioned forecast period.

Cryptocurrency exchange and wallet service Bittrex has announced plans to launch U.S. dollar (USD) trading pairs for two new cryptocurrencies, according to an official announcement published August 8. Per the announcement, Bittrex is looking to expand its fiat markets to Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Ripple (XRP) on August 20. The new trading pairs will be […]

When you say cryptocurrency in the Philippines, the first thing that comes up in their mind is "Bitcoin". And for some Filipinos' brain is some kind of another scam in the country. But if they will do more research about it, I'm sure they will find an easy way to trade their fiat into cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, Ethereum,...

This is only a content summary. Please click the title or go to <a href="http://www.goodfilipino.com">goodfilipino.com</a> for the full story.

<p>Some great articles coming out from Hacked today... </p>
<div class="pmpro_content_message">This content is for Gold Member, Platinum Member, Lite Member and Money Makers Club only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.</div>

Researchers have been diligently prodding cryptocurrency and blockchain companies for kinks in their security and it seems some of them are finally getting recognition for their work.

Three researchers are up for Pwnie Awards
this year an annual showcase of the best and worst in information security. Little toy ponies are given to the most deserving hackers and security researchers.

MIT Digital Currency Initiative director Neha Narula and Boston University researcher Ethan Heilman have been nominated for “Best Cryptographic Attack” after cracking a hash function in popular cryptocurrency IOTA. In addition to that, ConsenSys security engineer Bernard Mueller is also up for “Most Innovative Research” for his work on securing Ethereumsmart contracts.

Cracking IOTA’s hash function

Forging IOTA transactions was apparently achievable “in just a few minutes,” according to Narula and Heilman. The pair discovered a method that allowed funds to be stolen directly from users wallets. They attribute the security hole directly to IOTA’s implementation of its hashing algorithm.

The vulnerability was originally discovered last year, and IOTA has since addressed it in a series of blog posts
. While Narula and Heilman are clear to state that the exploitable attack vectors have been plugged, they do note that the faulty hash function is still being used in some parts of the IOTA platform.

Keeping smart contracts secure

Muller is nominated
for his extensive research on the security of Ethereum’s blockchain. His paper
, titled Smashing Smart Contracts for Fun and Real Profit
, introduces a new security analysis tool for smart contracts called Mythril.

He pokes fun at the tech community for not “learning much since 1996,” with a myriad of security vulnerabilities stemming from a reliance on older programming languages when creating smart contracts. Myrthil is Muller’s contribution to smart contract security, with an intention to remove bugs that may lead to money loss.

Muller’s research also celebrates the modern hacking infrastructure. He does note, though, that the dawn of Ethereum’s “world computer” and its constantsecurity concerns are eerily reminiscent of the early internet.

This time around there’s one crucial difference, though. In the early days, bug bounty programs didn’t exist, and zero-day vulnerabilities
were dumped on mailing lists just for the so-called lulz, so unless you had rather dubious connections, the only profit to be made was gaining the respect of other security researchers. Hack a smart contract, however, and you see some actual
money.

The awards are scheduled for later today, so we’ll update this piece with the official standings. The full list of nominations can be found here
.

Did you know that a bitcoin transaction does not have a recipient field?

That's right! when crafting a transaction to send money on the bitcoin network, you actually do not include I am sending my BTC to _this address_. Instead, you include a script called a ScriptPubKey which dictates a set of inputs that are allowed to redeem the monies. The PubKey in the name surely refers to the main use for this field: to actually let a unique public key redeem the money (the intended recipient). But that's not all you can do with it! There exist a multitude of ways to write ScriptPubKeys! You can for example:

not allow anyone to redeem the BTCs, and even use the transaction to record arbitrary data on the blockchain (this is what a lot of applications built on top of bitcoin do, they "burn" bitcoins in order to create metadata transactions in their own blockchains)

allow someone who has a password to use the BTCs (but to submit the password, you would need to include it in clear inside a transaction which would inevitably be advertised to the network before actually getting mined. This is dangerous)

allow a subset of signatures from a fixed set of public keys to redeem the BTCs (this is what we call multi-sig transactions)

only allow the BTCs to be redeemed after some time in the future (via a timestamp)

etc.

On the other hand, if you want to use the money you need to prove that you can use such a transaction's output. For that you include a ScriptSig in a new transaction, which is another script that runs and creates a number of inputs to be used by the ScriptPubKey I talked about. And you guessed it, in our prime use-case this will include a signature (the Sig in the name)!

Recap: when you send BTCs, you actually send it to whoever can give you a correct input (created by a ScriptSig) to your program (ScriptPubKey). In more details, a Bitcoin transaction includes a set of input BTCs to spend and a set of output BTCs that are now redeemable by whoever can provide a valid ScriptSig. That's right, a transaction actually uses many previous transactions to collect money from, and spread them in possibly multiple pockets of money that other transactions can use. Each input of a transaction is associated to a previous transaction output, along with the ScriptSig to redeem it. Each output is associated with a ScriptPubKey. By the way, an output that hasn't been spent yet is called an UTXO for unspent transaction output.

The scripting language of Bitcoin is actually quite limited and easy to learn. It uses a stack and must return True at the end. The limitations actually bothered some people who thought it might be interesting to create something more turing-complete, and thus Ethereum was born.

The ups and downs in the prospects of a Bitcoin ETF have rocked cryptocurrencies. So far, requests have been rejected, but a lot of progress has been made. Here is everything you need to know about the topic. Many factors are moving the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Ripple. Real-world usage, regulation, hacks, scaling, [...]

For those following the cryptocurrency space, scams and schemes are nothing new. The seasoned trader or spectator will spot a dishonest project from a mile away… or pay the price. But what do you do when you come across an HONEST scam? Enter FOMO3D and POWH3D, Ethereum-powered smart contracts that let you go long on […]

Following decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union and of the French Conseil d’Etat dealing with virtual currencies (e.g., bit??coin, ethereum), the director of the Luxembourg direct tax administration clarified the tax treatment...By: Allen & Overy LLP

But the bearish turn has been a blessing for Genesis Global Trading's new lending business.

Genesis originated $30 million in crypto loans on Tuesday, its largest amount ever, as many borrowing crypto are doing so in order to take a short position.

Bitcoin markets have been in a tailspin this week, but that's actually been a blessing for one trading firm's burgeoning new lending business.

Genesis Global Trading, a crypto trading shop based in New York, launched a crypto lending unit, Genesis Capital, earlier this year. That business originated $30 million in crypto loans on Tuesday, its largest amount ever, according to chief executive officer Michael Moro. The company typically lends out around $2 million per day on average.

In a sense, it could be a bearish indicator for the market. Many of the people who are borrowing crypto from the firm are doing so in order to take a short position on a given coin.

"Hedge funds could borrow bitcoin to short it, for example," Lex Sokolin, a partner at Autonomous NEXT, the financial-technology analytics provider. "This would mean they borrow some amount in bitcoin, sell it, and then repay in bitcoin (at whatever price) whenever the loan comes due."

Part of the bump in lending is also tied to the launch of Ethereum Classic trading on Coinbase, according to Moro.

As for the business' next steps, Moro said he expects to expand its services. One thing the firm could do is start doing is put the collateral they are given for loans to work.

"All the people borrowing and shorting are putting up collateral," he said. "We have the ability to turn around and do whatever we want with the collateral."

The company is also considering US dollar loans. This would mean a bitcoin holder who wants to liquidate his or her crypto could do so without selling it but still have access to cash.

Blockchain Developer
Netherlands, Amsterdam, Rotterdam
Start Date: ASAP
Leading Financial Services client is now looking to recruit an experienced Blockchain Developer to join an innovative FinTech service and produce client facing websites and applications. To be considered for this role you will need the following:
Skills
• Demonstrable experience with Ethereum, Corda...

Program Request (Crypto Currency Calculator)
Description:
What I am looking to have created is a Crypto Currency Converter that supports the crypto currencies that I have listed below. Now, this Converter should be able to be executable from a Mac/PC/and down the line Phone app.

But the bearish turn has been a blessing for Genesis Global Trading's new lending business.

Genesis originated $30 million in crypto loans on Tuesday, its largest amount ever, as many borrowing crypto are doing so in order to take a short position.

Bitcoin markets have been in a tailspin this week, but that's actually been a blessing for one trading firm's burgeoning new lending business.

Genesis Global Trading, a crypto trading shop based in New York, launched a crypto lending unit, Genesis Capital, earlier this year. That business originated $30 million in crypto loans on Tuesday, its largest amount ever, according to chief executive officer Michael Moro. The company typically lends out around $2 million per day on average.

In a sense, it could be a bearish indicator for the market. Many of the people who are borrowing crypto from the firm are doing so in order to take a short position on a given coin.

"Hedge funds could borrow bitcoin to short it, for example," Lex Sokolin, a partner at Autonomous NEXT, the financial-technology analytics provider. "This would mean they borrow some amount in bitcoin, sell it, and then repay in bitcoin (at whatever price) whenever the loan comes due."

Part of the bump in lending is also tied to the launch of Ethereum Classic trading on Coinbase, according to Moro.

As for the business' next steps, Moro said he expects to expand its services. One thing the firm could do is start doing is put the collateral they are given for loans to work.

"All the people borrowing and shorting are putting up collateral," he said. "We have the ability to turn around and do whatever we want with the collateral."

The company is also considering US dollar loans. This would mean a bitcoin holder who wants to liquidate his or her crypto could do so without selling it but still have access to cash.

Following botched plans to launch on Ethereum, decentralized encyclopedia Everipedia has announced its operation is going live on the EOS blockchain. Everipedia wants to rival Wikipedia by offering a truly open and censorship-free database of information. Its developers claim that Wikipedia suffers from too many regulations and “bureaucratic-type overseers” that make it “attractive only to a relatively small portion of potential encyclopedia writers.” There is an inherent connection between the two platforms, too: particularly the presence of Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, who is Everipedia’s chief information officer (CIO). The hope that Everipedia will benefit from EOS’s supposed decentralized nature –…

Following botched plans to launch on Ethereum, decentralized encyclopedia Everipedia has announced its operation is going live on the EOS blockchain. Everipedia wants to rival Wikipedia by offering a truly open and censorship-free database of information. Its developers claim that Wikipedia suffers from too many regulations and “bureaucratic-type overseers” that make it “attractive only to a relatively small portion of potential encyclopedia writers.” There is an inherent connection between the two platforms, too: particularly the presence of Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, who is Everipedia’s chief information officer (CIO). The hope that Everipedia will benefit from EOS’s supposed decentralized nature –…

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much of the innovation in blockchain technology has been aimed at wresting power from centralised authorities or monopolies. Unfortunately, the blockchain community’s utopian vision of a decentralised world is not without substantial costs. In recent research, we point out a ‘blockchain trilemma’ – it is impossible for any ledger to fully satisfy the three properties shown in Figure 1 simultaneously (Abadi and Brunnermeier 2018). In particular, decentralisation has three main costs: waste of resources, scalability problems, and network externality inefficiencies.

The blockchain trilemma highlights the key economic trade-offs in designing a ledger. Traditional ledgers, managed by a single entity, forgo the desired feature of decentralisation. A centralised ledger writer is incentivised to report honestly because he does not wish to jeopardise his future profits and franchise value. Blockchains can eliminate the rents extracted by centralised intermediaries through two types of competition: free entry of writers and fork competition. Decentralisation comes at the cost of efficiency, however.

Finally, we informally make the important point that while blockchains guarantee transfers of ownership, some sort of enforcement is required to ensure transfers of possession.

When banks were fraudulently transferring ownership by foreclosing on mortgages by robosigning, they had to get the assistance of sheriffs to obtain possession. The problem with MERS, the record-keeping system that enabled the frauds, was not that it was centralized, but that it was subject to "garbage in, garbage out".

The first thing to note is that, as Eric Budish has shown in The Economic Limits Of Bitcoin And The Blockchain, the high cost of adding a block to a chain is not an unfortunate side-effect, it is essential to maintaining the correctness of the chain, and limits the value of the largest transaction it is safe to allow into the chain. This supports BA's analysis that if the system is decentralized and correct it must be inefficient.

Second, BA's analysis is of Platonic ideal blockchains, for which the assumption holds that miners are abundant and independent, and decentralization is an achievable goal:

Miners of successful blockchains in the real world, such as Bitcoin's and Ethereum's, are not independent; they collude in a few large mining pools to achieve reasonably smooth income. The two largest Bitcoin pools are apparently both controlled by Bitmain. They only have to collude with one other pool to mount a 51% attack.

Miners of less successful blockchains may be independent but they are not abundant. The availability of mining-as-a-service means 51% attacks on these chains are becoming endemic.

In practice decentralized and secure is not an achievable goal. The security of a successful blockchain rests on the reluctance of the dominant pools to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Or, to put it another way, far from being trustless, users of a successful blockchain must trust the humans controlling the dominant pools. Not to mention the core developers.

The division between tangible, knowable core code, considered as internal to the Bitcoin ecosystem, and the disruptive actions of actors outside of what constitutes the core allows for the network to maintain its narrative of algorithmic decentralization when facing contradictory evidence. Why do users continue to trust in code, especially in this particular code, in the face of such breakdowns?

From VL's abstract:

In contrast to the discourse, we find that power is concentrated to critical sites and individuals who manage the system through ad hoc negotiations, and who users must therefore implicitly trust—a contrast we call Bitcoin’s “promissory gap.” But even in the face of such contradictions between premise and reality, the discourse is maintained. We identify four authorizing strategies used in this work

The first of the strategies is:

the collapse of users and their representations on the network into the aggregation of CPUs that power the network. This ambiguity with regards to the identity of the Bitcoin community — individual human actors or their dedicated machines — allows the network to be portrayed as a self-regulating system not susceptible to human foibles, and simultaneously as an enabler of direct action. Under the edict of ‘one-CPU-one-vote,’ any incident within the Bitcoin network is at once the expected result of running the protocol and the enforcement of an expressed consensus of its users. The Bitcoin protocol reimagines its constituency as amass of CPUs.

The second is market liberalism ideology:

the assumption of rational, self-interested agents. When CPUs as stand-ins for a mass of individual users appeared to have been accumulated at the hands of a single actor such as GHash.IO, both the pool operators and the core developers issued statements to reassure users that it would not be in the pool’s rational self-interest to undermine the network or to go over the 51 percent threshold. ... Developers did not hesitate to predict what the pools would or would not do based on rational choice, even though the original developer had failed to predict the (rational) emergence of pools in the first place.

The third is trust in experts(!):

The belief that cryptographic know-how should grant particular actors in the network governing power enables the simultaneous elevation of Nakamoto’s paper as the ultimate authority of keeping the network within the bounds of its intended purpose, and the acceptance of the Core Development Team as the legitimate body to carry out updates of the code. A commitment to technocratic order first enrolls users in the network through the promise of a decentralized system that ensures the need to trust no-one, and then, when the system’s unsettled and unpredictable nature becomes visible, the technocratic order privileges certain actors as legitimate holders of centralized power until the infrastructure can be stabilized again. Collapsing the difference between users and CPUs further facilitates this technocratic structure, because if the Bitcoin network is composed of machines, then who better to rule it than engineers.

The final strategy is "its just a bug":

The fourth and final discursive strategy is casting problems as temporary bugs that will not be present in the final, ideal version of the code. Instead of critically reflecting on the shortcomings of the ‘trust in code’ narrative, participants are asked to ignore contradictions as limitations of a particular implementation of the code. Sites of centralized power are cast not as inherent consequences of the architecture, as features of it, but rather as temporary shortcomings to be overcome in later iterations of the code, as bugs to be patched. Bitcoin’s and blockchain’s initial appeal comes from the promise of a one-time buy-in into infallible code, which will be from that moment on fixed, knowable, and autonomous. Once issues of centralization emerge, however, the code then becomes a malleable experiment, subject to iterations and improvements to address the temporary aberration. If anything is maintained as fixed, it is the belief that trustlessness can be engineered, the belief that Nakamoto’s elegant vision is almost within reach through minor technical adjustments. Participants are asked to trust if not this version of the code, then the next one, in perpetuity. It is of no consequence whether solutions are in sight today, because the peer production model will keep iterating until they are.

Thus as problems appear, such as the uselessness of Bitcoin for actual transactions, fixes such as the Lighting Network are layered on top of the inadequate underlying technology. And when problems are found in the Lightning Network, such as the difficulty of routing leading to the emergence of centralized "banks", another layer will be created. Layering can be an independent activity, whereas fixing the underlying technology involves obtaining consensus from its governance structure. The history of Bitcoin's blocksize shows how difficult this can be.

Following botched plans to launch on Ethereum, decentralized encyclopedia Everipedia has announced its operation is going live on the EOS blockchain. Everipedia wants to rival Wikipedia by offering a truly open and censorship-free database of information. Its developers claim that Wikipedia ...
Reported by The Next Web 3 hours ago.

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Cryptocurrencies have been hit hard by yet another delay of a decision on a Bitcoin ETF. A delay does not mean a rejection, and there are now two more critical dates to watch. An upwards move could start ahead of these dates. Ethereum was struggling with $400, and now the ETH/USD is around $350. Ripple, [...]

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It’s tough to argue with the statement that the past 48 hours has represented some of the most brutal selling that we’ve seen in the cryptocurrency complex in months. The picture that has been created varies from coin to coin, with some holding up relatively well and others getting absolutely pummeled. Eventually, this is how […]

Another bridge between the crypto and investment worlds has been built, this time by the Toronto-based firm, Ether Capital Corporation. Spearheaded by CEO Brian Mosoff, the investment company is vying to become the go-to resource for project funding within the Ethereum ecosystem. In line with its overarching goals, Ether Capital has just announced the acquisition […]

A while back, when many of us were noobs in crypto trading, we believed that buying and HODLing was the proverbial greatest invention since sliced bread. But when our XRP, Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC) and the rest started declining in the markets back in January, we started reading up on charts and how […]

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